by John Simpson
The mole could burrow deep, and the mole could work in secret. These attributes of the word encouraged English-speaking spymasters in the twentieth century to readopt the word in the context of espionage, meaning what was later also called a “sleeper”: an undercover agent, and especially someone who was embedded in an enemy organisation and who might be activated years later, when still trusted and yet unsuspected, to catastrophic effect. The use apparently arose in the context of the Russian Revolution, but it was popularised later in the twentieth century in John le Carré’s Smiley books.
I had final say on what we selected for our work, but word-selection wasn’t really an issue, as we had drawn up rules and guidelines based on hard evidence of currency, which took any guesswork out of the whole process. We applied a rule of thumb that demanded that any term had to have existed over several years (we said five in the early days, and later modified that to ten); had to be documented in various genres (formal, technical, everyday, slang—not all of these for every word, of course); and had to be evidenced by at least five documentary examples in our card files. If a term passed these tests, then it might find its way on to the editorial conveyor belt.
This was the mid-1980s, the period of my dictionary career when—as leader of the New Words group—I carried around a small flip-top notebook in the back pocket of my trousers, ready to pull it out (like a policeman’s notebook) as an “incident” arose—i.e., when I heard a new word or meaning we might want to add to the OED. Words were only admitted into the OED if we had printed evidence for their existence. When I heard a new word on the radio, on a record, or in conversation, this clearly didn’t represent printed evidence. But it was a hint that we might need to dive into our word files to see if other evidence had accrued for it which we had so far overlooked. Did my system have any effect on the dictionary? Well, this time—yes. Soon enough, we were researching Bob Marley’s “natty dread” and investigating “knotty” dreadlocks (natty being a regional variant of knotty). My notebook prompted us to work on bubblewrap and clingfilm, which my predecessors had missed up till then. Obviously this procedure went completely against our established policy of letting the collection of data in our word files determine what we edited, but I made sure that any findings were validated against our word files.
My informal method of word collection worked well for a couple of years. I could imagine I was a street-level lexicographer stealthily collecting terms no one else would ever come across. The problem was that one day I left the notebook in my trousers when they went into the washing machine, where it was categorically destroyed. I never did buy another one—our new-word-detection methods were getting better, and I was happy enough that they were starting to produce reliable results without my extra help.
The 1970s and 1980s were a time of steadily increasing affluence backed by the new computerised technology which was seeping into everyone’s lives. It was always important to recognise that the new words on which we found ourselves working reflected these trends, and that they were entering into the language at an astonishing rate. It’s not hard—in retrospect—to spot examples. Affluenza (ultimately traced to 1973), for instance, was just the sort of blend (of affluence and influenza) that language purists hated. Advances in robotics brought us animatronics (1971); research promoted by new social issues brought us antiretroviral (1979) drugs and biodegrading (1970); and heaven knows what little pixies brought us AOR (= album-oriented rock: 1977). More money in our purses and wallets in society generally (though not, sadly, on the dictionary) paved the way for the booze cruise, and more leisure time provoked travel firms to offer awayday tickets (1972 onwards), which later (1976) morphed, along with reshaped business practices, into a seminar away from the office, and (in the eyes of anyone not attending) an opportunity for favoured employees to enjoy a luxury lifestyle for a day or two. Business-speak (1973) dates from this time, too. (When business awaydays finally filtered down to the editors of the OED in the 1980s, they consisted of a training session with a mug of coffee, a Danish pastry, a free stubby pencil, and an orange juice in an office off-site but well within sight of work.)
We found that computational vocabulary had seeped through from first-level, professional computing into a second tier of business such as finance, film, and the music industry. Ordinary people started to encounter this second-level computing in their daily lives: at banks, at checkout tills, and around their Walkman. They began using terms like EFTPOS (electronic funds transfer at the point of sale—another fine piece of gobbledegook crafted on the workbench of financial computing), ATM, paperless office, and cashless society, and were told to admire synergies and to respect fusion.
The words that streamed into our card files had always been an index to changes in our culture. When I first came across quotations for debit card in the early 1980s, I wondered how on earth it might work. It was characteristic of this wave of vocabulary that it had often been fully operational in America for some years before it reached our shores, though it seemed that I had not been concentrating enough on the global economy to take notice.
We needed to prepare definitions for these lifestyle accessories—a debit card became:
a card issued by an organization, giving the holder access to an account, via an appropriate computer terminal, esp. in order to authorize the transfer of funds to the account of another party when making a purchase, etc., without incurring revolving finance charges for credit.
That’s not a definition I am—in retrospect—proud of, but it was a child of its time. Its interminable length shows how lexicographers struggled with these emerging concepts and technologies. At the same time we had to write definitions in a style that would help readers understand both concept and meaning. As a result, we provided them with what amounts to a short manual in place of a definition.
Selecting and defining words, as you can see, can have many pitfalls. It is easy to be too precipitate in selecting a word for inclusion in the dictionary. But if we’d held off defining debit card until the British public had become familiar with it, then we would have disappointed other audiences, especially in America, where the expression was becoming commonplace. In general, we learnt to shy away from trying to define any new word—wherever possible—until it had a chance to settle down in the language. We adopted this cautious approach for two main reasons. Firstly, we know that the meaning of a word, and the perception of its meaning by users, can drift subtly while it becomes acclimatised to the language. Secondly, it is helpful for us to see whether others publish preliminary accounts of the word from their own impressions or research. That’s not cheating; it’s just good research sense. The OED is a historical dictionary, taking a long view. It doesn’t need to leap in at the first breath: better to present a considered picture. Smaller dictionaries of contemporary English don’t have such qualms, and offer an indication of meaning from the off. We give things a few years first.
Channel-surfing soon attracted our attention (1988). I have never felt happy with the application of surfing to this television context, as it smacks of the forced welding of new technology waterborne prowess more appropriate to California beaches. I could appreciate downloadable (1982 onwards), once I understood the process it was attempting to describe, but still baulk at cyberspace and all of those other lazy cyber-expressions, mainly because closer acquaintance with them seemed to involve putting on 3D specs. I did find that in the late 1980s some new words—such as these—were starting to annoy me. I shouldn’t have let it happen, as a neutral observer. The new wealth and the new technology of the Thatcher and Reagan years were creating a new decadence and a new polarisation in society, where redundancy and excess could fester. That’s a bit harsh on channel-surfing, but, as a thesis, I still think it’s tenable.
At this time, other words, outside this narrow, restricted A–G range, came within our editorial purview—such as the Caribbean term skanking. The 1970s and 1980s were an era of growing multiculturalism in British society, and hence in
language. The major multicultural linguistic influences in Britain were the Asian languages and the Caribbean variety of English, mirroring the increasing number of immigrants from these areas in our major cities. Music, food, and fashion found themselves in the forefront of our editing activity, and one of the successes of integration was chicken tikka masala, which rapidly rose to become one of our national dishes, despite never having been cooked previously in India. The OED dates the dish from 1975, but it was during the following decade that it achieved its stranglehold on the British palate as a bland and safe alternative to the hot and spicy Indian curry. Northern Pakistani cookery introduced us to balti in 1982 (it was first spotted in Birmingham): a more highly spiced dish “accompanied by naan bread,” according to the OED’s gastronomical aside.
I didn’t read much in the way of cookery books back then, but I did read a biography of Bob Marley, to add credibility to my expertise in Rastafarianism. It was from this multicultural background that the OED decided to address skanking.
I remember one day we were hard at work on this new non-technological musical term. Even I could work out from the evidence of our word-files that it was a Caribbean dance (or at least some sort of Caribbean movement to music). Despite my earlier transient interest in Rastafarianism, I had failed to develop any awareness of skanking, so things were looking rather desperate for us on the definition front. Predictably, our academic advisers were predominantly not skankers, so we could expect little help there.
Around that time, I appeared on a TV programme discussing language in a multicultural society with the performance poet Benjamin Zephaniah. Lexicographers are always asking people irregular questions, so I thought I’d try one of these on Benjamin. I enquired politely if he could explain to me the secrets of skanking. After one or two deep, old-fashioned looks—of the kind lexicographers are quite used to receiving—he told me that he was fully aware of the meaning of skanking but was also entirely unable to describe it to me in words. I even wondered if this was his polite way of secretly retaining the necessary information within the Caribbean community, and not letting it spill out into the popular forum represented by the OED.
Plan A had fallen flat on its face, but as a lexicographer I was bound to persist to the point of annoyance. In due course, Benjamin realised that he might as well give in, but instead of providing me with a written or spoken definition of skanking, he cunningly said that the next time he was in Oxford he’d drop into my office and perform a skank. This event would allow me to scribble down the particulars I needed for the definition.
True to his word, a month or so later I received a phone call from Benjamin to say that he was pointing his car in the Oxford direction and he’d see me soon. I don’t think I told any of my colleagues about the festival performance that would soon take place in my office on the ground floor overlooking the street in St Giles’, so none of them were privileged to witness it. When Benjamin arrived, we cleared an area in front of my desk and he danced, rather embarrassedly to start with, but with a growing sense of performance, his hands grasping the air in front of him in time to a silent beat. I wrote notes as the dance continued—the only time I have ever done such a thing. When it was over I had enough material to construct a definition, and Benjamin had to move on to his next (scheduled) performance that evening. If you look at the OED now you’ll see how to skank:
A style of West Indian dancing to reggae music, in which the body bends forward at the waist, and the knees are raised and the hands claw the air in time to the beat; dancing in this style.
We know the word arose in the mid-1970s. We have records of skanking from 1976 (the New Musical Express—probably one of the issues read by Tony Augarde, my predecessor as the eyes and ears of the street on the OED in the early 1970s). But we did find an earlier, 1974, example for the noun skank in the same sense, in the second of Charlie Gillett’s Rock File series. Charlie (1942–2010), an English radio presenter and rock-music specialist, probably best known for his influential Sound of the City, later assisted the OED on and off as a popular-culture consultant. I think he, too, wondered whether he was selling out by advising “Oxford” about popular culture. The verb to skank we took back even further, to 1973, with sources from the Caribbean itself, such as the Kingston, Jamaica, Gleaner newspaper. It was good and right and proper to have it recorded from real texts back in the home of reggae.
We scratched our collective heads, though, over the etymology of skanking. Clearly etymology wasn’t Benjamin’s strong point, and we fell back on our old favourite, “of unknown origin.” New Jamaican sources now suggest that to skank could have other meanings at that time as well: one is “to throw a person over your shoulder.” Another involved cheating and deceit. From an etymologist’s point of view we still cannot decide—on the available evidence—which of these or other meanings were primary. This isn’t that unusual. Etymology isn’t an absolute science. We can trace some words back through the languages—say from English to French, and then on to Latin (lots of words: advantage, benefit, chance, opportunity, seasonableness, but not timeliness), but somewhere the trail ends. If that happens before written records, then the etymologist has to rely on conjecture (which is sometimes a scholarly term for “guesswork”).
Words from predominantly oral cultures (such as Caribbean English) hit this point of etymological invisibility in the much more recent past: reggae, ska (music), samfie (a trickster). If skank is unrecorded before the late twentieth century, and there are no obvious hints as to where it derives from, then the lexicographer is forced back to “Etymology unknown.” But this is a worthy and valid position, and doesn’t upset lexicographers. Better information may turn up at some time in the future, and waiting for it to arrive is preferable to guessing now and being wrong. In any dictionary research, it’s possible to do twice as much work on a word, but only to advance our knowledge of it by 1 percent. That’s not an efficient way to proceed. All research decisions—at some point—have to be bounded by practicality and resources. If you have to, give up (for now).
It is commonly assumed that lexicographers have some advanced sense about which words are going to be the next big ones. We spend so much time staring at words, and analysing them, that people think we must develop some intuitive sense of what will be significant in the word market next year. Journalists like the idea that we can predict, and of course I don’t. It only causes us trouble, as my chief editor demonstrated ably but unintentionally soon after I had arrived on the dictionary staff.
In 1978, the chief editor went on a lecture tour of the United States. The prospect engendered enormous excitement for him, but some trepidation elsewhere in the department in Oxford. He was slated to lecture in New York, Washington, and several of the other big cities in the States. As a junior lexicographer I was commandeered to supply him with detailed background information for his tour—not, as it turned out, on the state of the language in Britain and in America (which I was expecting), but on the unmissable sights in the various states he was visiting. And before the days of the Internet, there wasn’t much I could do in the office in a hurry except to look on our shelves at the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (But then it’s also possible that I wasn’t motivated to do a whole lot more.)
A few days into the tour, the problems erupted. In a Q&A session after his lecture in Chicago, a journalist asked him where the English language was heading in the near future. This wasn’t a question we had discussed back at the office, but our chief editor liked to startle. In retrospect, I have a feeling he may have wanted to provoke a debate on the issue. The first echoes of his response reached us back in Oxford the next morning. We awoke to learn that in two hundred years’ time it was likely that Great Britain and North America would find their versions of the English language mutually unintelligible. We did a collective double-take when we heard that; it wasn’t on our back-room FAQ prompt for his lecture tour.
But the media loved it. At last they had found a fearless, uncompromising lex
icographer sticking his neck out and prophesying the future of language. It didn’t matter that none of us would be around to find out if the prophesy was accurate. What mattered was that the broadcasters could have a debate.
Are there any signs now that the languages are beginning ever so slowly to slip towards mutual unintelligibility? Not really. There are bound to be words and meanings that are more common in British English, American English, Australian English, etc., than they are in other varieties of the language, but in general, English speakers around the world are quite alert to the salient features of other Englishes. Our work in Oxford was daily teaching us that English was undergoing a process of globalisation rather than fragmentation. When we prepared an entry for a term that originated in North American English (say air guitar, hardball, or wacko), the unavoidable, standard profile of these words showed documentary evidence beginning in America and gradually seeping over into British (or Australian, or other regional) sources as we became more familiar with the expressions. English speakers were assimilating words from other geographical varieties of English, especially through the media. We had witnessed this assimilation of American English in previous decades (stumped, “nonplussed, rendered at a loss”; or slick, or to fly off the handle). Over the years we had forgotten that there was ever anything odd about them, and we accepted them now, thinking that they had always formed a part of British English.